Directed graphs are an important abstraction for modeling various applications. For example, an electronic circuit can be modeled with a directed graph having nodes for the circuit elements of the electronic circuit and directed edges for the connections between the circuit elements. The abstraction of the directed graph permits analysis of the modeled application using graph processing techniques.
One graph processing technique is the topological analysis of determining the cycles of the directed graph. For an example directed graph modeling an electronic circuit, the cycles of the directed graph identify the feedback paths of the electronic circuit. Thus, the cycles are extracted from the directed graph to determine the feedback paths of the electronic circuit. The extracted cycles of the example directed graph are analyzed further to determine the specific characteristics of the feedback paths.
For a directed graph having a large number of cycles, it is time consuming and difficult to determine the cycles in the directed graph. In addition, the analysis of the extracted cycles is also time consuming and difficult. There is a general need to improve the efficiency of extracting the cycles of a directed graph and to improve the efficiency of analyzing the extracted cycles.
The present invention may address one or more of the above issues.